Can't you just TASTE it?

Here is our orchard. Hint: it's easier to see the holes than the trees.

Two plums, two apples, two cherries. Probably no fruit for 3-4 years, presuming the deer that I suddenly see everywhere don't strip off the leaves and kill them.

It's been a bad couple of weeks on the farm. I set out the cabbage and lettuce on May 11 -- the lettuce died; the cabbage is sort of lingering on but it doesn't look good.

We set out the tomatoes (the ones I didn't accidentally snap off getting out of the pots) on May 17. It got down to 37 degrees on May 20, and 34 on the 21. Even the finest milk jug cloches can't protect tomatoes against that. The tomatoes are probably all dead, all 40 of them.

This is definitely as bad as we've done gardening in years. There's still a lot coming up: peas, spinach, beets, radishes. The strawberries are fine, the rhubarb is alive, and perhaps as many as 3 parsleys made it. The peppers and eggplants and still thriving on the ledge, waiting for better days. But all the failure has been pretty depressing. I can't help but think how screwed we'd be if we actually were relying on this to feed our family.

Still. The trees are alive; the chickens are thriving. We should be harvesting strawberries and radishes soon. We learn from our abject failure. Next year we'll do better.

Life gets in the way...

Sorry for the lack of updates -- it turns out having a baby and a couple jobs and a brand-new house and four chickens and plants is really hard. We're in kind of a busy patch in real life for the moment, and Baby seems to be so highly evolved she doesn't need to sleep, so opportunities to update are few and far between lately. Hopefully in a week or so (presuming Baby ever goes to bed for more than 20 minutes at a time) things will be calmer. I know what the weed is (hint: it's one of these) and I have a picture of the "orchard"!

Neighbors

Harrowing, I think. I should change the blog name to "things I don't know anything about."

We live kind of out in BFE, but that doesn't mean we don't have neighbors. A's family goes back on this land for generations, but we're the only ones who actually live out here now. There's about 700 acres around us that belong to his family but are rented to another farmer, and several hundred more acres to our south that belong to another family -- but we only see those folks a few times a year when they're actually working the land, like yesterday when I took this picture across the road.

It's sort of surreal to me to actually see people farming, especially this sort of large-scale monoculture. For the last few weeks enormous farm machinery has been driving past our house. I mean really massive, as big as a house. Although "farming methods, machinery, etc. used in the Idaho Palouse" is yet another thing to add to the list of stuff I need to learn about, even knowing nothing it's fascinating to see the different fields around here greening up at different rates. There are some with wheat already ankle high, looking like incredibly lush grass. And others, like across the road, just plowing/harrowing now.

Sea of Mud II: The Weedening

Have you seen this weed?



Because we sure as heck have; it's every-freaking-where. As the sea of mud begins to dry, these things are popping up anywhere there's bare dirt. It vastly, vastly outnumbers any other weed out there.

And there's another thing we're idiots about -- weeds. I know dandelions, tansy ragwort, crabgrass and pigweed by name. There are a few others I know by sight: the groundcovery one with the purple flowers and pods that shoot seeds; the feathery one that looks sort of like carrots; the various ones that look sort of like dandelions but aren't. And the thing is, the common weeds are so common, you hate to even ask anyone about them -- you sound like a moron. But you have to know your weeds in order to fight them, especially if you're anti-Roundup. For the moment we're pulling up as many as we can, and trying to figure out some kind of cheap cover crop we can plant that might smother them out.

So, if anybody knows what this thing is and maybe a magical trick to kill it without poison or, you know, effort, please let me know.

Who knew weather was such a big freakin' deal?

I used to think talking about the weather was the last resort of people who couldn't think of anything else to talk about. That was before I decided to be a farmer.

You know, in spite of everything, I like to think we didn't just move out here with absolutely no idea what we were doing. I took an 8-week class on small acreage farming, we've read tons of books, we've done a reasonable amount of backyard vegetable gardening, we've talked to growers at the farmers market. But I've been finding that the resources I've found speak most to our experience this spring are some books I read when I was about 10: the Little House on the Prairie books. Specifically, their focus on, and evocative descriptions of, the vagaries of weather.

Dust Storm, May 3.

Snow, May 6.

Not pictured: 80 (!) mph wind gusts, hail, rain of frogs.

What I mean to say is, weather. It's crazy! And has kept us cooped up inside since about April 28. As best we can tell, most of our crops are okay -- I tried to hat some parsley starts in the middle of a downpour and they mostly blew away, so we lost 6 or 7 of eight parsley plants. And we haven't planted a thing since April 26. The weather report for the next 10 days looks good though, so -- just like Pa Ingalls -- we're going to make hay while the sun shines.

Oh the weather outside is frightful...

The weather has just been nasty all week long, so we really haven't been doing much of anything. For the most part our plants outside seem to be taking it in stride -- but the onions, I'm sad to say, did not make it through the cold and wind. A moment of silence for the onions.

The chickens, however, seem to be doing just fine.

They grow up so fast: Stringer, Marlow, Avon and Prop Joe (I think; they get harder to tell apart as they get more chickeny)

I was pretty worried about them the first few nights -- it was getting down into the low 40s and it seemed like the light really wasn't warming the place up much. But they seem unfazed; they just keep eating and crapping the same as ever. It'll still be several (possibly as many as 15-20) weeks before we see any eggs, so for now all we get is compost out of them. I've been in there a couple of times to add to their litter; they absolutely freak out if you toss it near them -- they can fly pretty high, maybe 4 feet. Hopefully as they get bigger and heavier they won't be quite so airborne.

We have cherry trees we really need to plant, but it's not possible to even get near where the fruit orchard is supposed to be through all the mud (at the moment there are two sticks that someday might be plum trees there, so it's a little presumptuous to call it an orchard). We also have lettuce and cabbage starts that really need to go out, and a ton of seeds that need planting. Hopefully it will stop raining and hailing and blowing 40 mph winds before, say, June.